


Superball

by ntldr



Category: Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Literally the title, Short and Silly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-21
Updated: 2017-01-21
Packaged: 2018-09-18 21:43:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9404339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ntldr/pseuds/ntldr
Summary: To his credit, it wasn’t like Skywarp had purposely put it in his cockpit.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ladydragon76](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladydragon76/gifts).



To his credit, it wasn’t like Skywarp had _purposely_ put it in his cockpit. During the last battle one of the Autobot twins had jumped on him and sent him careening into a human warehouse. He’d exploded through the ceiling, scrambled around as he tried to get his bearings, crashing through crates and boxes as he went, and made a secondary hole in the side wall as he burst out with the intent of murdering a certain red Autobot.

But that had been days ago.

Now, he’d been simply flying along in formation with his trine, out on patrol as an excuse to stretch his wings and enjoy the planet’s mild stratosphere, minding his own business and up to no trouble at all, when something had dislodged itself from underneath the empty pilot’s seat and rolled across the floor.

At first Skywarp thought that the loose screw that Starscream was always talking about had finally materialized. He focused his sensors on it.

It wasn’t a screw. It was a ball. A small, plastic ball, not a bearing, not a component that he was missing from his hardware. 

Starscream pinged for attention, then banked to the right. Thundercracker followed, and so did Skywarp.

The ball rolled as gravity changed direction, then hit the wall, bounced with more energy than Skywarp had been expecting, and bopped along the seam between the wall and the cockpit window.

Skywarp chuckled to himself. When the three Seekers evened out, Skywarp purposely over-compensated, sending the ball careening to the other side of his cockpit and smacking into the glass. Then it continued to roll, following along the curve of the glass as Skwarp wobbled, then rolled.

Starscream pinged him again, this time in annoyance.

But Skywarp was having too much fun to mind him. He split off to roll again by himself, dove and rose, roller-coasted, looped, and gleefully watched and felt the tiny ball bouncing around madly inside of him.

It hit the joystick.

His giggling turned to screaming as he suddenly nose-dived and rocketed towards the ground, overridden by the unexpected input of manual control. It didn’t take him long to lock the joystick back into place, and with a pop and fizzle he was back on the same elevation of his trine, dazed from the fall and still moving at a faster acceleration, but no longer in danger of being an instant-pancake.

Starscream sent a series of rapid, angry pings at him, demanding to know what he was doing, and he was followed by similarly angry string from Thundercracker.

Skywarp pinged back. But as he decelerated to rejoin the formation, he made a quick calculation, twisted, and opened his cockpit to send the ball sailing out and into the open air.

He’d intended for it to hit Thundercracker, who could take a joke or two.

But Thundercracker dodged.

The ball smacked into Stascream’s nose cone. He shrieked and fell back, as if he’d been struck by Megatron and not a teeny plastic ball.

And to his credit, Skywarp _did_ get to stretch his wings that day, if only to get away from a certain seething and snarling Air Commander.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was originally going to be a one-off thing, but BalloonArcade and I got talking and wellhereyougo.

The strangest noises were coming out of one of the launch bays. At first Soundwave dispatched Ravage to take a look and then returned his focus to the console, where he was engaged in his daily battle of monitoring the human information networks. Such a task required most of his processing power, and it seemed that everyday it was compounded further, despite his habitual studies on common system structures and database collection and programming languages. The humans were always trying out something _new._ If it were up to Soundwave he would have disabled the entire thing and thrown the indgineous life forms of Earth into chaos, but Megatron dismissed the idea whenever he brought it up. Better to have a huge communications system that they could easily monitor than a subtle one that they couldn’t.

He was partly through redefining his definition of “meme” when Ravage pinged for his attention. It didn’t take much convincing from the Casseticon to get Soundwave to leave the console and come see what the commotion was himself. He was certain that the definition would change again while he was gone anyway.

The doors leading from the halls and into the launch bay were locked, and Ravage was sitting outside of them in plain sight. At Soundwave’s approuch he looked up and scampered over. He transformed, and Soundwave inserted the cassette back into his deck to use him to boost his recording hardware as he took Ravage’s place by the door and listened.

“I’m certain you could--ugh--get more in there!”

Skywarp.

“And I’m certain that I’ll hurt you if I try!”

Thundercracker.

“C’mon, just jam it in!”

“It’s not too much already?”

“I’ll tell you when I’ve had enough!”

Squeaking sounds, like a plane bouncing up and down on its tires, and Thundercracker grunted.

“TC, _c’mon!_ Fill me up!”

“I think you’ve had plenty.”

“No way, we are _nowhere_ near done. I want to be _stuffed._ ”

“How much more do you need?!”

“MORE!”

The squeaking continued, then intensified, increasing in frequency as both mechs gasped and grunted before the noise stopped and Thundercracker ventilated heavily.

“You look ridiculous.”

“Wait, I think if--Wait, there’s enough room for Starscream too!”

A pause. “We are NOT getting Stascream to help.”

“He can get his digits in places that you can’t!”

“You don’t need to be stuffed _that_ much, Skywarp.”

“Says you! Whoa…”

“What’s wrong?”

“This feels…” Squeaking. “This feels weird!”

A faint chuckle. “I’d imagine so.”

“Primus, I feel like I’m going to burst.”

“Too much?”

“Nah, it’s perfect. Okay. Okay, I think I’m ready.”

“Starscream’s in route. How fast can you come?”

“Might need to actually take it easy if you don’t want me to make a mess…”

It was at that point that Soundwave decided that his time might be better spent on human information network definitions after all. Turning off the recording, he shuffled away, his footsteps quiet as he now tried to actively _not_ listen to the Seekers.

One of the cassettes in his deck snickered, then quieted when he thumped it with his knuckles.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Starscream had already lured the Autobot twins out by the time Skywarp arrived, once he remembered that he didn’t need to figure out how to take off with the extra weight and could instead just _teleport._ The battle raged far below him, and the black-and-purple Seeker was loathe to disobey his instincts to stay in the clear, friendly skies, where all he had to worry about was anti-aircraft weaponry.

However, he hadn’t gone through all this trouble for nothing.

He dipped down, looking for the two splotches of red and gold that Starscream was toying with. It didn’t take him long, and when he did he further worried a more primal part of his cortex by flying even lower, nearly at the same elevation as the cliff where Sideswipe and Sunstreaker were prepping themselves.

They almost didn’t take the bait. Perhaps they sensed that this was too easy. But, just as he had predicted that they would, they couldn’t resist.

He found himself even (un)luckier when _both_ Autobots jumped on him, one on each wing, and balanced themselves as they tried to panic the Seeker and force him to crash. To their credit Skywarp _was_ startled enough to attempt to roll, though Sideswipe and Sunstreaker hung on and whooped victoriously when he failed to dislodge them.

Not that he really wanted to. He forced himself to wait until Sunstreaker tried to pry open his cockpit to grab at the manual controls.

“SURPRISE!!”

He popped the cockpit window himself.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

The sound that struck most of the mechs on the ground first was not the brief squawk of alarm over the comm radio. Nor was it the flash of light as a cockpit window was ejected and sailed off to places unknown. 

It was the unusual noise of hundreds of superballs striking two unsuspecting mechs.

They were, to say the least, dislodged.

Most of everyone, both Autobot and Decepticon, looked up to see what appeared to be a rainbow explode out from inside of Skywarp, smashing into the two mechs trying to ride him, and sending them cascading away with the wave that was now falling towards the ground. When he was done emptying himself, Skywarp teleported away with a crack and a fizzle.

The hundreds of superballs surrounding the twins made a surprisingly soft bed for them to land on with the first impact.

And then they went _everywhere._

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

“In all of my joints, in _all_ of my joints, and under my plating, and in my innards, ew, ew, ew, ew--”

Ratchet ignored the table where an armor-less Sunstreaker was curled up and instead concentrated on picking out the little monstrosities from inside a similarly-disarmored Sideswipe’s chasis. The once-red mech grimaced Ratchet had him sit up so that he could get at a particuarly stubborn superball that was nestled between two wedges on his protoform.

“And that’s...there. I think I got it.” He set the ball down into an empty cube, careful to not let it bounce too hard. He’d already made that mistake in the beginning.

From his own table where he was dealing with _actual_ battle damage, Jazz was only beginning to get his laughter under control.

Ratchet shifted so that he was level with Sideswipe’s face. “Did I get them all?”

Sideswipe narrowed his optics into a glare.

He put his hand over his mouth.

He doubled over, and coughed hard.

He sat back up, and offered the energon-stained superball to Ratchet.

Jazz’s giggling was renewed and redoubled back into full-blown hysterics. And then even worse when Ratchet’s answer to Sideswipe’s gift was to grab it and throw it across the medbay in disgust.

Frankly, the medic shouldn’t have looked so surprised when it came back.


End file.
